Getting Started: Installing LaTeX

A LaTeX editor. This is the piece of software you will use to write your LaTeX files and to generate a final PDF output.

Somewhere to save all your files.

Patience.

Installing LaTeX

LaTeX comes in several flavours – they all effectively do the same job. Some are specific to certain platforms (Windows/Mac/Linux/etc.).

MikTeX

I work on Windows and use MikTeX. To download this, go to http://miktex.org/. As of today, the latest stable version is MikTeX 2.7. Click on the link to this under ‘Downloads’ in the navigation bar. You will then find a page with simple installation instructions.

I haven’t tried XeTeX yet. My main preoccupation at the moment is learning how to use BibLaTeX, as I’ve given up hope of getting jurabib to produce citations in a particular style.

I just looked at the XeTeX examples on http://www.tug.org/xetex/ and it looks like it could be a much easier way of handling Arabic script compared to writing it out in Latin script in LaTeX. I will definitely look into this further.

Did you find it straightforward to use? And is there a manual on XeTeX? I wasn’t able to find one.